


dermal scarring and erasing the past

by Lleavingwonderland



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, Gen, Happy Ending, Light Angst, One Shot, Post-Canon Fix-It, Tattoos, fuck the gods am i right ladies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27205289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lleavingwonderland/pseuds/Lleavingwonderland
Summary: “They fit together. Because tides have traceable rhythms and (as Percy is so fond of noting) math doesn’t make any sense.”basically everyone hates Percy’s SPQR tattoo, even Percy, so let’s cover that shit up.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson, Percy Jackson & Sally Jackson
Comments: 23
Kudos: 147





	dermal scarring and erasing the past

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is brought to you by my ‘fuck the gods’ agenda.  
> or: god bless you rick, making a military cult that brands literal children and pressures them into service. not on my watch. not. on. my. watch.

In the state of New York it is illegal to tattoo a minor under the age of 18, with or without parental consent. Across the river in New Jersey, however, with consent and proper identification of a parent or legal guardian a minor can get a tattoo. Percy presents this information to Sally—Paul is present, but Percy speaks mostly to Sally—a month before Christmas.   
A year before, he knows Sally would have laughed out loud, told him there was no chance, not while he was living under her roof, and that would have been the end of discussion. He would have never even bothered to bring it up, but a year ago he hadn’t had a reason to bring it up. He was vaguely fascinated by the idea of having a tattoo in the way most teenagers were, but not committed to the idea.   
But it isn’t last year, it’s this year and he already has a tattoo: angry capital letters, a trident, and a single score mark. It had hurt like hell when he got it, still blurry on parts of his identity but pretty sure this didn’t fit into it. He remembers Annabeth’s preoccupation with it, her silent resentment and discomfort in the days after they finally met again.   
His mother had noticed the tattoo near immediately, her eyes fixing on it in the car ride from camp back to their apartment. He can remember the fingers of both hands on his arm and the thinly veiled shock in her eyes.   
“What is this?”   
“It’s from the…the Romans, mom. They don’t do necklaces,” he flicked his carelessly. “The legion does these, marks for years of service.”   
“SPQR?”   
“Senatus populesque romanus,” he recited detachedly, not looking down at the tattoo. The senate and the people of Rome.   
“They burned you.”   
That was all his mom said about it. But he knew she hated it. At least she didn’t blame him. It wasn’t like he had a choice.   
It caused more problems than it was worth, that tattoo. Which wasn’t saying much, since it was worth absolutely nothing to Percy.  
The first problem was that, since it was illegal to tattoo minors in the state of New York, it was against the dress code of his private school. Percy had always grated against dress codes in the first place, his hair always just unruly enough to piss off uptight teachers, his shirt perpetually untucked. But the tattoo had to be covered. Always.   
So he found himself confined to long sleeves, and perpetually having to remember that he couldn’t keep them pushed above his elbows.   
The few times it peeked out it was met with far too much fascination from his classmates and thinly veiled disdain in his teachers. If one more person asked to see his tattoo, or if it hurt when he got it, or what it was—he was going to scream. It was a good thing he wasn’t trying to build a good reputation, since he just stared them all down or told them to fuck off.  
His mom found him compression sleeves that he could wear to cover it in short sleeved shirts: they were slick athletic material and had a tight band of elastic that bit into his bicep. After about a week he had stormed into his apartment after school, ripped the things off and threw them at the wall.  
He rubbed and scratched at the imprint on his upper arm which pricked with pins and needles.   
Damn fucking Romans.   
But the problem was a lot more than a dress-code-violating irritant or the quiet disdain of the women in his life.   
Percy hates the thing.  
He hated it from the moment it burned into his skin five months ago, staring and staring at the images of flames dancing across his skin. His heart twisted when he wrapped his arms around Annabeth then caught sight of the angry black ink beneath the golden strands of her hair. He had stopped wearing his camp necklace shortly after his return, but this he could never take off.   
It struck him at the most inconvenient times, sitting in an ACT prep class with a timer counting down on a math section that lay forgotten as he stared and stared and stared at the trident peaking out from the edge of his sleeve. He almost felt too frozen to pull the fabric down and obscure it again. It was still there. He couldn’t pretend to be a normal junior in high school. He couldn’t escape from this side of his life, as much as he was trying to.  
It’s the middle of October when he decides he wants it gone. It’s the middle of the night and he can’t stand the sight of the thing, or the concept that it’s still there.   
The internet tells him that yes, you can remove tattoos, and that it costs nearly a thousand dollars. Several hundred dollars that he really doesn’t want to ask his parents to pay. Things were tight enough as it was without an expense.   
Half the websites take a condescending tone about changing your mind, or getting a bad tattoo. It only serves to piss him off more; this had never been his fucking idea.  
He tries to forget it. He buttons his uniform shirt at the wrist in the morning, tries his best.  
The next week is when he decides that he’d rather cover it up. It’s half the cost of removal. He’d rather have something else—anything else—scarred into his skin permanently.   
The idea doesn’t so much germinate in his brain as it sprouts a root system and grows overnight like weeds. Over the course of a week he finds a tattoo artist across the river in Jersey and a design that he wants and gets his nerve up to present the idea to his mom, careful to leave the marks on full display in the way he braces his forearms on the kitchen table.  
“I know it’s expensive, but it can be for Christmas,” he says, hoping this might lessen the blow even further.  
His mom is quiet for a moment, purses her lips. “Are you sure you want to do this, Percy?”  
Yes. He’s absolutely sure.   
His mom glances at Paul, a silent consultation with the other name on the bank account. He nods.  
“You make the appointment,” she says, “I’ll go if you’re sure.”  
“Thank you,” he breathes out a sigh of relief. 

The next week his mom drives him to Newark through thick New York traffic under an utterly overcast sky.  
His tattoo artist is a very short woman named May with arms covered in swirling flowers, who specializes in cover-ups. She appraised the design he showed her and nodded. She can do it. She draws out mock-ups on paper for size, changing height and length to obscure the Roman marks.  
“This tattoo is so new and is very dark so some of the lettering might show through,” she reminds him, “but I’ll do my best to line up the coloring to at least cover it all.”  
Percy’s ok with that.   
“Are you nervous?” she asks, rubbing his arm down with alcohol.  
He laughs a little, only because it’s that obvious. His hand is trembling on the arm of the chair. “Yeah,” he admits.  
She had given his existing tattoo a bit of a strange look but not asked any questions about it other than, “Ready to get rid of this thing?”  
He is.  
She takes the final mockup and traces it onto his skin with a purple marker: swirling waves and the neat lines of the golden ratio.  
The tattoo gun buzzes loudly in her gloved hands. It bites and burns, working dark outlines into his skin until it looks less like the Roman branding and more like a confused mess of lines. Better already, he tells May as she switches to blue ink to fill it in.  
The blue hurts more, for some reason. His mom asks if he’s ok, he shrugs and says he’s used to it. Then realizes that even if ‘I’m used to pain’ is depressingly true for him, it also sounds like he’s still in his emo phase.   
When she’s done, full hours later, his forearm is a riot of navy blue waves, light blue sea foam, black geometry, and angry red skin. No sign of a trident, or allegiance to a fallen empire, or a score mark promising another decade of service to an army.   
May wraps it in bandages and plastic and gives him a whole paper on how to care for it in the coming weeks (something noticeably absent from the Roman treatment—maybe calling down fire from the gods required no aftercare. At least it hadn’t gotten infected).  
He gently rubs his fingers over the bandage on the ride home, and thanks his mom again.   
“But that’s the last one,” she says, joking. “No more until you turn 18.”  
“No, this was enough for one year,” he agrees.

“I got rid of it,” he tells Annabeth on the phone later.  
“What are you talking about?”  
“The tattoo, I got it covered up.”  
“Wait, you just went and got a tattoo?” she sounds somewhere between genuinely alarmed and hysterical laughter.   
“Yeah. I convinced my mom to make it an early Christmas thing so I don’t have to look at it anymore.”  
“Wait, what did you get?”  
He smiles in silence for a second, deciding if he wants to try and explain it to her or wait for her to see it herself. He opts for the second. “You’ll see it this weekend,” he says. Annabeth hates surprises.  
“What is it, Percy?”  
He just laughs. Driving Annabeth crazy is, according to her, one of his most promising talents. “See, now you have to come over.”  
As if she wasn’t going to anyway.

Four days later when Annabeth walks into the Jackson-Blofis apartment she kisses Percy and tugs at his sleeve. “Ok, show me.”  
He does.  
Annabeth stares and stares. “Wait, that’s—I sent you this picture.”  
“Last fall,” he supplies.   
Annabeth, fiend for architecture, designs, and physics, had tried to explain the concept of fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio to Percy, known C- student. It was Annabeth at her best—intelligent, passionate, and light-years ahead of Percy. He loved her. The conversation was followed up a few days later by a picture of the spiral overlaid on the image of a wave. “It’s everywhere!” she had said.  
He saved the picture, because he thought it was cool, not because he was planning on having it permanently drawn on his body. Not then, at least.

Annabeth holds his arm at the wrist and the elbow, away from the still healing ink. A conspiratorial grin has crept across her face, more of a rarity these last six months, but just as beautiful as when it wasn’t scarce. He lets her examine it more, because that’s what Annabeth does.  
“It looks so good,” she says.  
“You like it?”  
“Yeah, I can’t believe you remembered that.”  
“See, I listen when you explain insanely smart math stuff to me.”  
She laughs to match her smile. And he knows this wasn’t about her but he feels like he did something right.

“It’s us,” he had responded to the picture she sent a year ago.  
A stormy sea and a math ratio.  
Order and chaos.  
Athena and Poseidon.

They fit together. Because tides have traceable rhythms and (as Percy is so fond of noting) math doesn’t really make any sense. 

He can catch his left arm in the mirror without a hot swirl of hatred and regret materializing in his stomach. Annabeth lays next to him on the couch over Christmas and traces the spiral in and out and in again with her fingertips by the flickering strings of light on the tiny tree.

He still covers it for school—picking at the cuffs on his shirts and scratching the imprints left by the sleeves when the weather gets warmer. Nothing will ever make dress codes palatable. But now catching the edges of it under his sleeve doesn’t seem quite so horrible. Even though he can never get back everything they took, he has at least reclaimed part of his own body. And it’s a start. It’s a start. 

**Author's Note:**

> less angst than usual, but you know i had to fix this.   
> if you feel so led, match the vibe of this fic by commenting something from SON that you want to retcon. 
> 
> also this is the tattoo that percy got:  
> https://www.pinterest.com/pin/410179478552659276/


End file.
